I was just poking around SO and I found this question. After reading through it so I could come up with a good answer for the asker, I came across the last thing he says: "Final solution thanks to help of experts!"

What's the best course of action here? A part of me wants to just copy his solution into the answer box with a disclaimer, just since that would meet the Q/A format and stand a better chance of helping people with similar problems in the future (not to mention, it wouldn't show up in the unanswered list). But that also feels dirty to me, like copying someone's answer to claim as my own (even though I'd of course add a disclaimer that it was the OP's).

In this particular case, I see it was active only a couple days ago, so I added a comment requesting he perform that action and answer his own question. But is there an SOP on this sort of thing?

I looked around Meta and couldn't find this exact situation, which surprises me a fair bit. I did, however, find this post about what should happen when problems are resolved in comments, and the answer to it suggests adding the solution as an answer with Community Wiki marked. Is that the best thing to do?

That isn't exactly the same. That's someone asking "is this the right way to do it?" when the answer is yes. I'm looking for the more blatantly incorrect case of a well-formed question going through the appropriate trouble-shooting process, then ending with the asker pasting their solution in the question. They're quite different scenarios.
– Matthew HaugenJul 10 '14 at 17:36

1 Answer
1

If any user's comment solved the asker'ss problem, it is the commenter's task to paste that comment in the answer box.

But if it seems that the commenter is not doing this, the asker should make the comment an answer. The reason behind this is clear. The new user always sees whether this question has an answer or not. So, if they see that it had been solved and they are wasting time visiting that question, they downvote that question. This is not good thing.

If the problem has been solved, the answer must be in the answers area, whether the answer is written by the asker or a commenter.